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What do I know about this series going into it?
I’ve never heard of it. Unavoidable glimpses of descriptive text while clicking through to watch the episode told me that Anne is an orphan and in this episode she’s going off to college.
Recap
A young couple in some kind of period garb – 19th century? – are arguing in archaic language. The girl, Winifred, accuses the boy of knowing all along that he never intended to marry her. He says this isn’t true; he only realized now that he’s in love with this other woman, who isn’t even interested in him. Winifred is hurt even more by this: It’s bad enough if you’ll leave me for another woman, but to leave me for nothing? She asks him to at least swear not to reveal that the engagement has broken off until she’s had the chance to leave the country, two weeks hence, so that she’ll be out of range when gossip begins to spread. He agrees.
The credits music is a jarring shift from the tone of the opening scene. They reveal that this show is based on Anne of Green Gables, which I have not read. And the episode is directed by Amanda Tapping, of Stargate fame.
A group of young men and women, teenagers, are chattering over their exam scores, expected to come in any moment. The teacher arrives and puts the results on a table, and there’s a rush to see who got into the various colleges they’re talking about: “Queens”? “Sorbonne”? It’s all too quick; I manage to catch that the town in which this takes place is called Avonlea, and that “Gilbert” and the titular Anne got the highest scores.
Anne and Gilbert try to speak while surrounded by everyone else; she seems to expect him to confess his love to her, but he doesn’t. Instead, after everyone else leaves, he takes the teacher aside and asks her if his scores are high enough that he can apply to the University of Toronto instead of wherever he was originally planning on attending.
Gilbert may or may not be the boy from the opening scene; I can’t tell.
Anne and her friend Diana walk together in the woods. They are excited about going to college together and being roommates, but Diana isn’t certain she’ll be allowed to attend. And this is in fact the case: we cut to her at home, her father screaming at her that she has to marry well rather than get educated, and her mother calling her “deceitful” but not explaining why. “You can negotiate with your husband over your education,” her father tells her.
Anne is working in the fields with her adoptive parents, discussing what she’ll need at Queens; the conversation reveals the year is 1899.
A boy knocks on a door. Nobody’s home. He leaves a note for Anne, telling her that he loves her after all. It takes me a while to recognize him as Gilbert. And since he says in his letter that he’s not getting engaged after all, I’m now certain that it was also Gilbert in the opening scene with Winifred. I don’t know the timeline, though; have two weeks gone by as he promised? Will this letter ruin Winifred’s attempt to get away before the gossip breaks?
Anne and her (adoptive?) parents return home, and she’s mad: her father is already planning for when she’s gone, selling her favorite cow because the family will need less milk, and already planning to take on somebody else to work on the farm when she leaves. She storms off to her room, because it seems to her they don’t care at all that she’s leaving. There she finds Gilbert’s note, but she doesn’t read it: “You’re too much of a coward to tell me to my face!” She tears it up and tosses it out the window. Which she immediately regrets, running outside to collect the pieces. But she puts them back together in the wrong order.
Not noticing that the reconstituted letter no longer consists of comprehensible English sentences, Anne convinces herself that it reads that Gilbert doesn’t love her. She goes to Diana’s house to unburden herself, but Diana is lying in bed even more upset than Anne, because she isn’t allowed to go to Queens.
In the fields, Gilbert is talking to a man named Bash, who sees another man approaching in the distance and runs off to confront him. This man (Elijah) is here to return a medal that he stole from Gilbert’s father and apologize for the things he’s done. Whatever he’s done, it must be pretty bad: Bash is not very forgiving, but reluctantly allows Elijah to visit his mother’s grave on the property and sleep in the barn for one night.
Anne’s mother meets with Diana’s mother and tells her how her attempts to hold Anne back backfired. It’s a little bit too obvious that this will convince Diana’s mother to allow Diana to go to Queens. Later, Anne’s mother goes to the post office and receives a letter from a Mrs. Thomas; no idea what that’s about.
That night, Anne’s mother scolds her husband, Matthew: all your “practical decisions” in selling the cow and taking on a new farmhand are making Anne think you don’t care about her at all and won’t miss her when she leaves. He confesses that he does care, but he wants her to be able to begin her life without worrying about how her parents are doing. But his wife tells him that’s less important than making her feel loved and missed.
The following morning, Elijah comes to the field where Bash and Gilbert are working. There is an unspoken question asked, and an unspoken answer: Bash allows him to work with them.
Anne is preparing to leave for college. Matthew enters her room, and there’s a pregnant pause, but he chickens out at the last minute, saying he’s “just come [to carry] the trunk”.
It’s orientation day at Queens, with only five students (including Anne) being welcomed by a Mrs. Blackmore and Lily, the latter of which is a deaf-mute who can sign and read lips. The rules at Queens are a bit draconian, which initially has Anne depressed and missing the freedom of her home. But she quickly bonds with the other girls.
Meanwhile, back in Avonlea, Gilbert has gotten into the University of Toronto.
Bash agrees to let Elijah stay. I don’t understand the family relationships in this subplot at all. Bash was seen in several scenes with a woman and a young baby, who I initially thought were his wife and daughter. But he then refers to the woman as his mother, and to the baby as Elijah’s sister. That would Bash and Elijah’s brother and the woman Elijah’s mother – yet Elijah’s mother is dead. So I’m completely lost.
Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert – which I now discover is the surname of Matthew and his wife – receive a second letter, this one addressed to Anne.
They decide they must not open it or forward it to Anne at Queens, but rather bring it in person so they can be there for her when she opens it; I assume they have good reason to believe that the letter contains news of significance, even beyond the fact that it’s 1899 and came from overseas.
The letter is a response to their attempts to find Anne’s biological parents, who emigrated from Scotland to Canada. But it’s not great news: The church that they belonged to can’t tell them anything beyond the fact of the emigration. Anne seems perfectly fine with this, saying that despite the disappointment this doesn’t mean she has any less than she did before. But a boy (Gilbert? I can’t tell) takes her aside and says he knows her too well. She sobs into his arms.
Mr. Cuthbert brings Anne the money from the sale of the cow, saying she can use it for traveling money. And he finally opens up to her a little bit: “I didn’t want to hold you back”, he says, and confesses he will in fact miss her.
Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert leave Queens, discussing how Anne put on a brave face but was obviously disappointed by the letter. Then they go to a Mrs. Thomas’s house and introduce themselves – and oops, Marilla and Matthew are not husband and wife as I’ve been calling them the whole time, they’re brother and sister. That’s embarrassing.
Mrs. Thomas is a bit senile and very crotchety.
Her memory requires a bit of a jump-start. But she does remember having taken in “Anne Shirley” ten years earlier. In a locked cabinet in Mrs. Thomas’s house the Cuthberts find a book, “The Language of Flowers”, containing an inscription from a Walter to a Bertha, who is a teacher. The implication is that these are Anne’s parents.
Meanwhile, Anne is dressed up and walking through town, where she runs into Winifred, who is angry at her. “I see he’s told you!”, Winifred says, to Anne’s confusion. “Come to gloat, then, have you?” She’s so furious that she almost tells her about Gilbert’s broken engagement outright – but luckily, Anne doesn’t catch on, and just politely withdraws from the conversation, with a passing “I hope you and Gilbert have a wonderful life together.” This instantly deflates Winifred’s anger: “You really don’t know?”
Meanwhile, Gilbert runs into Diana and her father on a train. Diana’s father congratulates him on the pending engagement, but Gilbert tells him the engagement is off. This earns him a lecture from Diana: How could you not tell Anne anything? How could you do X and Y and Z and A and B and C, all to push Anne away? The diatribe is marvelously delivered but too fast for me to follow.
So Gilbert runs to meet Anne at Queens, while Anne equally quickly packs her things in a hurry to find him. He reaches her dorm just as she walks out the front door, and they kiss.
Okay, let’s see if we can sort out the geography. There is a train line from Green Gables/Avonlea to wherever Queens college is (I’ll call it Queensville) and onward to Toronto. Gilbert boarded the train to Toronto; coincidentally, Diana and her father were on the same train, him having been convinced by Mrs. Cuthbert through his wife that Diana should be allowed to attend the school. They met, and Gilbert found out that Anne loves him and how much of an idiot he’s been. So when Diana got off at the Queensville stop, Gilbert did too. He ran all the way from the station to Queens college, met Anne, they kissed, confessed their love, and agreed to write each other often.
In the meantime, Diana’s father took her in a carriage from the train station to Queens. When they arrive, he offers to give Gilbert a lift back to the station so he can resume his journey to U of T. (It’s not clear if Gilbert’s luggage is still on the train and the train is still waiting, or if he left it somewhere in the station and will be loading it on the next train.)
The Cuthberts return to Queens to bring Anne the book, her first clue about who her parents were. She finds small notes written in the book, including a mention of her own birth and a drawing of her mother, who also had red hair. She excitedly tells Gilbert about this in her first letter to him.
Unresolved questions
Will Anne ever find her parents?
Will Anne and Gilbert stay together?
What will become of Winifred?
Ratings
Story: 7/10. Each individual plotline was relatively simple: young love, leaving home for the first time, the search for Anne’s parents, Diana being given the chance to make her own future. But they intersected and interacted each other well. The Bash plotline is the exception, not interacting with any of the others at all and not particularly interesting, but I’m leaving it out of the calculation because I didn’t understand it at all.
Writing: 8/10. The episode’s commitment to using period language went up and down depending on who was talking; in particular Winifred seemed to be reading from a different script than everybody else. But otherwise I was impressed. It deftly handled, within only a few moments, Anne’s feeling of alienation in her new dormitory followed by quick acceptance into a new friend group. It showcased the ownership attitude towards women that was common in the time period without becoming too preachy. I did have some trouble following the geography, but I assume that that’s clearer to viewers who have been watching since episode 1.
Production: 10/10. The actors really shined. Most shows would kill to have their leads put in the performances this one got from minor characters like Mrs. Thomas, and even the random girls that Anne matriculated with. And then there are the leads: the struggle on Matthew Cuthbert’s face, and the worried looks that Marilla gave him from the background; the fury in Diana’s parents’ eyes, and Diana’s warring feelings of anger and desperation and submission; the lecture Diana gave Gilbert; Winifred’s desperation and sense of betrayal.
Beyond the acting, you could see that the show never settled for “good enough”. The score was beautiful, particularly in the scene where Anne is frantically packing and Diana is lecturing Gilbert. Clear attention was paid to costuming and set design - no Party City dresses here. Good direction brought it all together into a cohesive whole. I have nary a bad word to say about it.
Characterization: 9/10. Partly because of the acting, partly because of the dialogue, but I got to know the characters’ personalities very quickly. The weakest link was Gilbert, but even he is not too weak a link – the scenes on the train with Diana and her father and even the brief moment with Anne in the schoolhouse gave me a good initial sense of who he is.
Clarity: 6/10. I got the main plot without difficulty. There were very few mixups between similar-looking characters. Unfortunately, the Bash plotline was completely incomprehensible. And there were strange references to Anne’s imagination that I didn’t fully grasp – is she prone to out-and-out hallucinations?
Closure: 7/10. Obviously there’s the big flashing neon sign of closure: Anne is leaving her adoptive home for the first time and setting out in life. But I hesitate to score this higher because I’m less certain about the other plotlines.
How long have Anne and Gilbert been pining for each other (and how long have they known they’re pining for each other)? Is this the first piece of information that Anne has ever gotten about her parents or is it simply the biggest to date? These plots both saw momentous advancement. But they still have a long way to go towards true resolution.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I do! I generally enjoy costume dramas, but they always contain the risk of descending into soap-opera levels of melodrama. I saw no signs of that in this episode, which is encouraging. So I think I will in fact give the series a shot from the beginning.